Took fifth on the grid, Mercedes’ best qualifying performance since Silverstone, beating Felipe Massa and Jenson Button.

As soon as the race got underway he picked off Hamilton for fourth but his race ended when Mark Webber spun into the wall on lap 19. The Red Bull wreckage skidded back across the track where Rosberg had no chance to avoid it.

Immediately after the crash Webber was probably too angry on himself to think. Then he saw the car his brain didn’t come back working properly. But thats only what I think. Bad luck for Rosberg anyway, a potential win thrown out of the window.

I don’t think that was the case. In Valencia when he drove right over Kovalinen’s car you could see on the onboard camera on Webber’s car that his front tires locked up while in the air, which means that he had been fully on the brakes. Which i guess is because it is very instinctive for the drivers. I think that he should get a punishment, like a 5 place grid drop next race, he should have been on the brakes to stop the car rolling.

Deserved or not, that penalty would surely raise a lot of criticism. The season is almost over, Webber is the most serious rival of Alonso, and a penalty at this point would surely be perceived as an undeserved gift for Ferrari/Alonso. Maybe he should be punished, but my guess is he won’t.

@Mads: I didn’t say hitting the wall is worse, of course it’s the other way around :o

And to clarify what I mean:

After hitting KOV, he was chocked and afraied, this time he was frustrated so instead of thinking about what was the safest thing to do, he was so frustrated he just couldn’t think properly. When making a silly error that throws away such a good shot at the championship, you simply must be frustraited.

The onboard footage doesn’t tell the whole story, but it helps. Webber lets go of the wheel, and grabs it when it’s already sideways. Find a reverse angle of the crash and you’ll see the car drifts along the wall in a straight line for a moment and then something breaks and it veers onto the course.
Webber is sensible to try and roll all the way off the road otherwise he’s going to cause an even bigger accident – no way an F1 driver wants another car spearing into the side of him at race speeds, to suggest it is lunacy!

I dunno if it would have made any difference (or even if he did have his brakes on), only 2 of his wheels were in contact with the ground (rear left was ripped off, and front right was correspondingly up in the air) when he went off across the track into Rosberg.

To me Rosberg’s comments sound like a bit of deserved sour grapes at having a potentially great race wrecked by another driver having an accident that had nothing to do with him.

I thought Mercedes took a big gamble in putting an untested wet weather setup on the car on the track whilst the race was red flagged, but it was a gamble well worth taking and Ross and his boys all deserve lots of praise for doing it and making it work.

I will have to agree here. Breaking or not I doubt would made much difference. Besides that big of a side impact would sure move your feet and legs about making it very hard to hit the break or even you did might cause you to loose the peddle.
Further consider how close the wall where to the track at that location breaking could potentially also placed him right in the middle of the track which would been even worse. As pointed out one wheel up in the air and one ripped off break performance wouldn’t been the best. I’m not sure but I would assume the individual tires break systems are independent so ripping off the break system from one or more tires would still mean the others would still function. I assume they are like regular cars and have split hydraulic systems so failure on one or two tires would still allow power to the remaining tires?

I also wondered why he didn’t break, did he think it was Hamilton he was running back into?

What is wrong with you and Alistair? If Webber was a stupid man, then yes, he would intentionally back into Hamilton. But Alonso was and is Webber’s biggest threat. If you’re going to come up with conspiracy theories, at least let them make sense.

If webber took out hamilton, he would have been as good as out of the championship. That would only leave vettel and alonso to look out for. Yes, Alonso would have been better to take out, but Hamilton would have meant one less championship contender.

It is not about eliminating contenders, it’s about winning the tittle!!! Great Webber, nice job, you left Ham out but Alonso is the champion, eh?!?

If the action was intentional, then Alonso would have been the man to hit. 2nd in the WDC and right behind Webber in th race. Some Ham fanatics sometimes just see the whole world conspiring against him

I think perhaps the issue with Webber was that he only had two wheels touching the ground. The left rear suspension broke on impact with the wall which made the right front lift in the air when he was rolling backwards. I’ve never tried driving a car with two wheels but I doubt there was much he could do.

If you tear front right and left right calipers off an F1 car and hit the brakes, would you expect pedal pressure? #justSayin

Followed by in responds to a question

Front/rears are obviously completely separate, but I think it’s quite possible that the rear circuit was u/s too. Will ask ;-)

And finally

@VirginRacing looked like left rear took a hard hit. My guess is no brakes. Thx for the insight mate.

So if what ViriginRacing his hinting about in their communication with @Formula1blog

Webber could try to break as much as he wanted to no avail, guess we will really never know for sure but I found this exchange interesting indicating that after that shunt he might or might not had any breaks at all. Only official word from RedBull Racing and/or telemetry data could really prove this. But at least this answered my question I had regarding the breaks. If you bust of the calipers on one front and one rear you no longer have any breaking power. Front wheel was for sure busted up badly and rear tire didn’t look to well of either she he might or might not had any breaks.

Mike-e that’s a good point..and it’s lucky hamilton did get took back over…i wreckon he would’nt have had that great a visibility as well to see that it was nico in his mirrors. looking at the crash there are only 2 things he must have been thinking –
Try and keep this thing away from the wall and keep the momemtum by moving across the racetrack

The conspiracy theory is because both the McLaren and Mercedes are SILVER whilst the Ferrari is RED. Even out of the corner of your eye you’d know it wasn’t a Ferrari, but whether it was a Mercedes or a McLaren you couldn’t be sure.

Having said that, I don’t think it would have made any sense for Webber to intentionally take out Hamilton, he needed drivers in play to take points of Alonso and Vettel, having Hamilton finish ahead of either of them would have been preferable.

Yeah I was wondering that to! What the hell did he think? And also he turned the wheel so he’d roll back out on track. Clearly the car was damaged but he initially rolled backwards in a straight line and all of a sudden he turned the wheel to steer out over the track.
Feelt so bad for Nico who could have scored maybe even a victory after Vettel’s engine blew up, which was soooo insanely sad! =/ Is Vettel the new Kimi Raikkonen with his unlucky problems?

Uhm go look at the replays. One front wheel is WAY up in the air and the tire that was not in the air was the tire that hit the wall and more then likely had broken suspension and steering link as well.

Plus to avoid hand and wrist injuries procedure is upon inevitable collision get your hands of the steering wheel and keep them off or find yourself with a broken wrist or ripped of thumb.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocKfnKDklPw
Look at around 23 sec. Hamilton knows crash is expected so remove his hands of the wheel. At about 33sec you have another crash check the steering wheel how it snaps back and forth. Could caused serious injury if holding on to the wheel.

Actually if you check the onboard camerahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GJJIFpuTCA&feature=related
at about 1.12 when he is spun around and crash is imminent he takes hands of the wheel, slams into the wall and grab hold of the wheel again shortly after the crash but it’s not more then fractions later that he is hit again. It actually looks like he is trying to steer the car at a 90deg across the track or at least it looks like he is doing a small correction to get his cutting angle across the track bigger.

If he had hit his breaks and/or not adjusted the steering angle I think he would/could have gotten stranded in the middle of the track which would been even worse.

It was unfortunate that Rosberg got collected but such is racing at times. Alonso got nicely by but Rosberg was at the wrong place and took the wrong path. Feel sorry for him.

There’s no real excuse for letting your car roll back across the track like that. Webber got away with another one, yet again. Really he should be on the receiving end of a grid penalty for the next race.

I think this is a stupid assertion, if Nico had carried on the racing line and still clipped Webber then Nico would be getting a penalty for not trying to avoid it.

Doesn’t matter how fast your reflexes are, you have no idea how fast a damaged F1 car without four wheels in the wet is going to stop or slow down, and what Nico did was his best hope of avoiding it without looking in hindsight.

@Icthyes………..That is a bit under the belt and an extremely unkind remark about young Nico Rosberg? ………why blame the young man who was the innocent victim?.

Of course it was Mark Webbers fault.This isn’t the first time he has taken other innocent drivers out.He should have been punished,leading the Championships or not,why should he get away with it??others are punished enough goodness only knows..

I was very surprised at Rosberg, it does show lack of experience. Every time I have heard or seen written comments by top racing drivers from Moss to Schumacher they always say the same thing. In situations like that aim for where the loose car is coming from, don’t aim where it’s going. OK he may still have crashed into Webber, we will never know, but usually if they aim for where the car is coming from they get away with it, if they aim where the car is going they don’t.

He actually had plenty of time to make his mind up, watching, I realised he was going to the wrong side of Webber as soon as he changed his line, and my reflex’s are those of an old man, not a GP driver at the prime of his life.

@skett it was his rear left suspension which had failed, the whole car would have been pitched at an angle, he would have instantly known it was broken, what followed then could be one of those conspiracies that rattles on…..

Oh no, another Timo Glock-Brazil conspiracy event? Rosberg probably didnt realize that one of Webber’s tires was pointing at the sky and the other front suspension had collapsed. Oh and it was sopping wet. If I were Webber I would have been keen to roll off the track instead of waiting against the wall for an unsighted car to ram him. Webber did the best thing he could in the circumstances.

I hope everyone suggesting that Webber was trying to intercept Hamilton is trying on some dark gallows humor. That kind of accident, a car hitting another disabled stationary car, the kind that injured Will Power and Zanardi so badly, is the nightmare of motorsports. In today’s age of safety it is one present scenario with a good chance of killing a driver, or two.

Glock’s Brazil incident was staged of course, you really think Lewis would be so passive to let a WDC go in the last lap when all he had to do was to pass just one car if he didn’t know something was going to happen ?, don’t be so naive.

3)
When you, after something like a crash, are moving across the track with a damaged car, then the last thing you should do is to alter the speed and direction of that movement when you know that other cars are closing in. Why? Well, if a driver sees your car moving in one direction he can estimate were that car will be when he passes it and then chooses the best way to pass. If the driver in the crashed car all of a sudden stops or change direction, then it will just confuses other drivers approaching with speed. If you think about it, you have probably seen many crasches due to this.

Some pls correct me if my observation is wrong…after mark webber spun around and hit the wall there was still enuf momentum to put him into a 2nd spin..with only 2 wheels on the ground I’m sure even if he did break,he wudnt have been able to stop due to aqua planing. Secondly if he did slam on his breaks like most people suggestdont u think he wuda locked the breaks n slid of jus the way he did anyway considering how bad conditions wer(cars breaking in a str8 line we’re slidn ryt of)..and if he broke lightly then maybe he would have stoped in the middle of the track makin it even more dangerous for him or a driver behind him,taken into consideration that he wudnt have been able to move after comin to a stop because he car and rear suspension was broken pretty bad.

When I watched the replay of the accident I specifically looked to see if his front wheels were locked and then wondered myself why he didn’t seem to hit the brakes. Only Mark and the telemetry can tell us if he tried to brake, so it would be interesting if the team responded to this assertion. Regardless, it’s a shame that Rosberg was taken out.

I think some of you need to take a hard look at the onboard from Mark. He DOES take his hands off the wheel just before he hits the wall. As he hits the wall, he lets the wheel spin violently, then grabs it and tries to straighten the car out so that it DOES NOT roll across the track. Unfortunately, the left front was cockeyed and the right front is pointing straight- neither wheel changes direction when Mark is moving the steering wheel. Mark was unable to steer the car. It is unknown whether his brakes still worked and whether he hit them or not. It is also unknown whether hitting the brakes would have actually prevented his car from rolling.

I can see now what Webber was trying to do. He obviously was unaware that the car was damaged beyond repair after the first part of the crash and tried to save it – whereas when I was watching it live, I thought he was crazy trying to park his car on that side of the race track. It all happens a lot faster than we can imagine, and slow-motion onboard shots can make him look a bit silly. It was obviously a spur-of-the-moment thing that he probably regrets now, but it’s not much good blaming him too much – as we all do silly things under pressure.